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Wikipedia FAQWikipedia FAQA. The original wiki standard was to treat anything scrunched together and capitalized LikeThis as a link. In an encyclopedia, though, this frankly looks ridiculous. So we have updated our software recently; we can now create so-called Free Links. We are in the process of converting our old-style links to new-style links. "Pardon our dust," as they say!
A. January 15, 2001. An earlier version of the wiki (including original versions of some of these pages) was briefly hosted on Nupedia.com (first posted January 10). The idea of a Nupedia-sponsored wiki originated out of a conversation Larry Sanger had with Ben Kovitz on the evening of January 2.
A. Well, that's an interesting question. The owner of the server, the domain name, and the ultimate copyright of Wikipedia materials is [Bomis], Inc. But the articles are released under the GNUFreeDocumentationLicense, so the articles are open content. So it is a bit misleading to say that the owner of Wikipedia articles is Bomis; Bomis doesn't own them in any traditional sense of ownership. (Bomis CEO and President Jimbo Wales might want to elaborate this reply.)
A. You should not give credence to anything you read here.
Less flippantly, you should realize that this is, quite self-consciously, an experiment in public collaboration quite unlike any print or online encyclopedia, and therefore it will be difficult to project the results, in terms of their credibility, until the project is farther along. But even then, you'll have to judge the results based on the articles themselves, rather than the credentials of their writers (which is itself often an unreliable way to determine credibility, as you know).
A. On Wikipedia, English. But we can set up wikis in any language. Please ask (or look to see if one has been created in your language) on international Wikipedia.
A. Yes, in fact you can. Consideration for others demands that you exercise extreme caution in doing so, if the page in question isn't one that you started, or is one to which many others have contributed something of interest. But strictly speaking there's nothing stopping you: all you have to do is remove the text from the page. You can also click on the name of the page (at the top of the page) to see what other pages link to the deleted page, and delete links to it. Again, extreme caution is advised...and you can make use of the BadJokesAndOtherDeletedNonsense page.
A2. Usually (but not always), rather than deleting a page, the page should be redirected somewhere useful. If someone write a nice article on 'JFK' it should be moved to 'John F Kennedy' (or similar) and a redirect put in place. If someone writes a nice article 'Lincoln' (about Abraham Lincoln) then it should be moved to 'Abraham Lincoln' and then 'Lincoln' should be a page which lets people select from [Lincoln, Nebraska]? or Abraham Lincoln.
In this way, accidental linking is maximized. I think that this plan fits the [principle of least astonishment]?.
A. If you delete all the text on a Page, the page remains as a PaGe. It does not go back to PaGe?. Only the administrators can completely delete a page.
A. Not really. You need to be a wiki administrator (with a special password) to permanently and totally delete pages. Any other users could remove the text of a page, but any other user could restore the text from the "kept pages" archive (which is kept for at least 2 weeks in the default wiki setup). If someone did an extensive attack, they could be blocked from further editing by the admins. (In the future a new feature may also allow an admin to undo all recent edits from a particular user or IP address.) Moreover, we are keeping backups of the server itself. For more discussion see [this discussion of "wiki wipeouts."]
A. Only system administrators can do that, so you'd ask Jimbo Wales or Larry Sanger (we might just set up a "change request page" for this purpose). In the meantime, you can use the #REDIRECT [[new page name]] command. On this, please see our page editing instructions.
A. Sure.
A. It's not required, but it allows you to tell wiki to save your settings and thereby have Wikipedia be displayed in the same way each time you return. It also credits you with changes you make, instead of a meaningless IP number.
Visit the [Preferences] page to create your "user number"
A. The contents of the Wikipedia is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License.
A. Add it to the WikiPediaBugs page. If whatever's happened is so serious that you can't even do that, well, someone will notice it soon enough.
A. Yes, click on the RecentChanges link at the top and bottom of every page.
A. Sure, the PowersthatBe simply have to make it happen. See the feature requests page.
A. You can use the search feature to find similar pages. (The search is not case-sensitive, so a search for "internet" would find any of the pages above.) In Ward Cunningham's [wiki], there is a spelling checker, but it has caused some concerns. You could always make a request on the feature requests page.
A. This is a difficult problem. Part of the problem is that html web pages don't do math symbols very well at all. So almost any solution will be a crutch. Within the next couple of years, browsers should be able to render MathML?. This will be a time of much joy. Between now and then, I'm open to suggestions, but I think this is a really hard problem.
(Added note by [Zephyr]) The best way to put in math would probably be to write it in TeX? (or LaTeX?) and then use [TtH]. This will generate an HTML file with all of the math symbols in text form (no images). Here is an [example], and here is [another]. TeX? is almost inarguably the standard for mathematical writing.
As much as I admire Knuth, I must disagree totally. MathML? should be the ultimate standard, not TeX?. For one thing, TeX? is more display-oriented and MathML? is more semantics-oriented. MathML? is also the standard supported by the [World Wide Web Consortium], and will therefore likely be supported by browsers (Mozilla and Microsoft are committed to it, for example). TeX? is used by a few academics, but they don't represent the real world.
It really comes down to WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) vs WYSIWYM (What You Say is What You Mean). First of all, I would like to say that TeX? is used almost exclusively by anyone writing up math. Can you show me any major publication which does not require submissions to be in some variant of TeX?? A popular thing about TeX? is that (if you so wish) you do not need to worry about formatting, you can just say "this is a section, format it for me". You can still have this flexibility by setting the templates. Have you looked at MathML? lately? I was looking at some MathML? examples and it seems that TeX? is much more straightforward to write. $x^2-4=2$ becomes <math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mrow> <msup><mi>x</mi><mrow><mn>2</mn></mrow> </msup> <mo>-</mo><mn>4</mn><mo>=</mo><mn>2</mn></mrow></math>. I cannot speak much for this, everybody is entitled to their opinion, but I think that MathML? would have a very tough time overthrowing TeX? (although it would be good for the TeX? to MathML? convertor).
A. Good question. Wiki software does use some html, but not all of it. One reason is for simplicity when typing--for instance this text is indented because I typed a : character at the start of the line. In order to do that in HTML, I would have to type much more. The wiki syntax also prevents many common errors, like not closing a bold-tag and making all the following text be bold.
Another reason for not using raw html is security--several old versions of popular browsers have security problems that can be triggered by arbitrary "malicious HTML". Even without considering security, malicious users could do things like Javascript popup windows or page redirects if they had full HTML ability. Several "experimental" sites that allowed full-HTML editing have suffered such attacks, including a couple other wikis that allowed arbitrary HTML.
There is a "raw-HTML" option in the wiki code, but it is defaulted to "off" for the public release. I strongly recommend leaving it off for public wikis. (If that option was enabled, you could type "<html><h1>Header</h1></html>" to create a header.) See the [Meatball Wiki RawHtmlWiki page] for earlier discussion of these issues.
The HTML tags directly supported in the current version are i, em, b, strong, tt, and pre. There is also a pseudo-tag "nowiki" which you can use to prevent the wiki from formatting your text (like NotALink--edit to see the tags). The "code" tag acts like a combination of the tt and nowiki tags. The latest release (0.91) adds a new wiki-syntax for h1-h6 (h1 is =text=, h2 is ==text==, etc...).
The Wikipedia may have different needs than the typical wiki. The formatting rules are easy to change, and I am willing to try new things for this wiki if the maintainers of this site want changes. --CliffordAdams (Later, the Wikipedia maintainers have added support for several extra tags like h1, font, sub, sup, font, table, and a few others. Eventually the documentation will be updated.)
A1. Don't worry about different user numbers. It's often easier to set up your different IDs than to use the current (March 2001) login procedure.
A2. If you really want to log in, here is the procedure:
Note that you must set a password before trying to login from another system.
A. Good question. Why not write on TheLegalImplicationsOfWikis? (It's probably already been done on [Ward Cunningham's original wiki].)
A. Yes, why not? You can link to anything you want. You can either type the URL in directly, or else in this format: [URL nameofpage]. This results in a link like this: [Nupedia.com].
A. Surely both.
A. Good question. See publicize Wikipedia.
A. I'm afraid it's for precisely the reason you fear: the people who are organizing this view it partly, from their point of view, as a business. They hope to recoup their costs, at the very least, by placing banner ads, someday in the possibly-distant future. It would, thus, be dishonest of them to use .org. Of course, if you don't like this, it will be possible to export all the contents of Wikipedia for use elsewhere, since the contents of Wikipedia are covered by the GNU Free Documentation License.